We all know that Bernie Madoff conned some of the best and brightest people in the banking industry right across the world while he committed the biggest fraud that has every been committed in finance history but I want to know why he was allowed to use his Mayfair bank as a personal clearing house and a piggy bank for his dirty money.

Were the FSA either complicit in this fraud or were they simply incompetent ?

Far be it for me to defend one of the main causes for the banking crisis, but this really isn't their remit. Would you be happy if every time you wrote a cheque someone from the FSA rang you up to ask where you got it from? That is the job of accountants and auditors.Sorry - don't shoot the messenger!

Are you now trying to support what Madoff did as he conned millions of people out of BILLIONS of pounds and dollars ?

I TOTALLY agree with Angie that the finance watchdogs SHOULD have spotted what Madoff was up to and stopped it long before he was able to rip off so many people.

All that this scenario says to me is that if enough high-flyers are willing to look the other way thieves like Madoff will always have a free hand in order to be able to do what they do best: steal from some of the greedy fools that thought he could make them even richer than they already were. The rest were victims !

Zathrus......"alarm bells" WERE ringing loudly for quite some time before the whole thing went "tit's-up", the trouble was that the people at the top - who were making the big killings from the commission and the payouts - did not want it to stop even though they knew it was about to collapse around their heads.

There is good evidence that whistleblowers and security advisors had been trying to warn the industry for some years before the big collapse and all that happened to them was that they were either silenced or they were sacked.

The so-called self-regulation that was supposed to safeguard such large mistakes were either ignored or they were not even used. The FSA were in no state to impose regulations as the regulations that COULD have been imposed had been so watered down as to be virtually useless.